Slaten Throws Herself Right Back Into Ocean of Pressure, Obsession

Consider softball, the true Great American Pastime, where the players tend to look less like Steve Garvey or Rickey Henderson. In fact, they look more like something you’d attempt to push back into the sea if it washed up on the beach.

Consider the goal of most softball games: Winning, which entitles your team to crash into the nearest tavern to celebrate with mugs of beer, which add more inches to the stomach, which in turn makes you look even more like a softball player.

And consider the ramifications of losing a softball game: None. The losing team also roars through the door of a nearby tavern to pound the suds and has just as much fun as the winning team. And, if the postgame activities are done properly and with enough intensity, the losing players probably won’t remember who won the game anyway.

All in all, softball is a great sport.

Unless you are Kathy Slaten, a fastball pitcher who feels as though her life has turned to sludge when someone gets a hit.

Kathy Slaten is to softball what IBM is to counting on your fingers.

In three seasons at Cal State Northridge, Slaten was simply overpowering. Her opponents had roughly the same chance of hitting her consistently as Orson Welles has of winning the Boston Marathon. She piled up an incredible 1,322 strikeouts in 1,032 innings, including an NCAA-record 533 as a junior last season. She has pitched 18 no-hitters for the Lady Matadors, 11 of them in the 1984 season alone, and has an unheard-of three-year earned-run average of 0.24.

With Slaten leading the way, Northridge was crowned NCAA Division II champion in three successive seasons.

She crushed her opponents with the 85 m.p.h. fastball and a screaming riser that neared the plate at belt-level but suddenly veered skyward. Hundreds of very good college softball players swung at Slaten pitches that were over their heads.

But the same talent that confused and befuddled her opponents eventually confused and befuddled Slaten.

“I don’t enjoy it anymore,” she said last season in announcing that she would not return for her senior season. “It’s not fun. There’s too much pressure. Teams are not so much out to beat Northridge as they are out to beat me.”

The college career of Kathy Slaten was over. But then, as she played semipro ball in Bridgeport, Conn., something not very unusual happened. She discovered she missed the college game. So the college career of Kathy Slaten has resumed.

“The more I was away from it, the more I missed it,” she said Thursday. “I realized how much the game and the friendships at college meant to me. So I decided to come back and give it another shot. I finally realized that I’d never have this chance again. You can only do this once.

“Now that I’m back, I know how much I would have been lost without it--more than I ever would have admitted. College is the last chance to do this. You’ve got the rest of your life to do everything else. Sometimes I try to rush myself too much.”

Slaten said she realizes the same pressures that drove her from the game in May will still be waiting for her this season. She has found no miracle cure for the pressure. She says she doesn’t know if she’ll handle it any better this time around.

“The pressure won’t be any different. I’ll just take more Rolaids, I guess,” she said.

The pressure to win, to be the best, began building in Slaten in high school the day she found out, as all great athletes find out, that she was able to do something much better than any of her friends.

“Pitching always came so easy to me,” she said. “It was just so easy. It was, I guess, a God-given talent.”

But the pressure didn’t threaten to blow her lid off until her sophomore season at Northridge. By then she had breezed through a 21-9 season and was midway through a 39-7 season. Suddenly, the college softball world knew Kathy Slaten. A bounty was placed on her head.

“I remember this one game where someone else was pitching for us and the other team was asleep,” she said. “They were dead. They got a few runners on base and they were still dead. No noise, nothing.

“Then I came in to pitch. I took one step out of the dugout and their team went crazy, yelling and screaming. I just wanted to pitch and do good. They wanted to slaughter me. That’s hard to deal with.”

Slaten countered that type of behavior by developing an obsession. An obsession to win, an obsession to dominate. It hasn’t gone away.

“I expect to throw a no-hitter every time I step on the mound,” she said. “Every time. People come to expect that from me. I feel such tremendous pressure because of the thought of letting my teammates down, of letting everybody down.”

Coach Gary Torgeson says he’s caught in a dilemma. He hates to see one of his players become so engrossed in winning, in throwing no-hitters, that the pressure causes ulcers, which Slaten said she developed last season. Torgeson is not in this for laughs, however. His team is a three-time national champion because of Slaten. Without her, the Lady Matadors would have lost bunches of games and probably been champions of nothing. And Torgeson knows that coaches who don’t win don’t stay around.

Torgeson knows this because he was once the school’s football coach.

“I can’t condone the do-or-die approach to sports,” he said. “I realize I’m here to win, and I’ll do everything I can to make sure we do win. But maybe there’s too much of that attitude in all sports, at all levels.

“It’s my job to teach them to deal with both sides, the winning and the losing. To teach them that if they try their hardest and still lose, if they strike out 18 batters and still lose, that they are not losers.”

This season Torgeson has another pitcher, a sophomore transfer from Arizona named Lisa Martin, who also throws smoke. Torgeson thinks she has the potential to become another Kathy Slaten.

“Lisa can really take some of the pressure off Kat this season,” Torgeson said.

A nice thought. But inside, Torgeson knows that only Slaten can take the pressure off Slaten. And he knows that’s pretty unlikely.

“I don’t know how to lose. I don’t know how to fail on a softball field,” Slaten said. “As much as I’d like to be able to smile after a loss and say that I did my best, I know I can’t. I just can’t do that.”

Bring on the Rolaids.